We need better CAPTCHA's

Am I the only one tired of entering CAPTCHA's ? I understand how they work and why they are required, but I think their level of difficulty is really getting out of hand.

Whyyyyyyy do I still have to enter them !!!

With Internet access getting mainstream, we are provided with a multitude of services. Sadly, some bad people abuse those services. To be more efficient, they end up creating automated computer programs to abuse those services on a larger and more repetitive scale. While you wouldn't subscribe to hotmail 2000 times (why would you), those programs do (why do they ?) and they do it faster than any humans could (a couple of seconds for thousands of registration). You can figure out how that could be problematic for those services to get thousands upon thousands of invalid emails and see those emails start spamming valid ones...

An imperfect solution to a problem I don't have to deal with

Enters the CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). Basically, a CAPTCHA consist of an image of text over a background. To prove you're human, you have to write down in a seperate field that text to validate your human descent. But here comes my beef... five or ten years ago, CAPTCHAs were pretty simple images that anyone with basics reading skills could decipher... then came better and smarter computer software and those CAPTCHA's couldn't hold a malevolent software anymore...

Give me a rest, I'm only human !!!

Nowadays, CAPTCHAs have been replaced by 3-year-olds version of themselves... with lots of colors, graffiti's, psychedelic backgrounds and such... they have been made unreadable not only for computers but for regular users... and that's why I can't stands them anymore... it takes me up to two minutes to figure out what is written (usually not words, but a series of nonsensical letters and numbers mashed together)... and sometime, I need to try 2-3 times to get it right... from that experience, can we all agree that CAPTCHA's have reach their limits and start looking for better ways to deal with this problem ?

The end user penalized

As a user, I don't get to deal with the problem created with automated software... why am I the one paying the price ? I register for services / products often on the web, why do I have to suffer to get my service ? Why am I the one they are cracking down on when they could simply try a different approach.. can't they monitor where the demands come from and act accordingly ?

A better way...

I think we must admit machines are now way smarter than we are when it comes to text recognition... can we take a new approach now ? Or do I have to keep changing my lens prescription every time I come across a CAPTCHA...

What do you guys think ? Any suggestion on how to handle this problem ? Am I the only one pissed with those things ? Or am I just a sentient computer and I haven't figured it yet ?